Hostname: page-component-77f85d65b8-7lfxl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-04-22T16:04:54.971Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Evolutionary game theory and typology: A case study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Gerhard Jäger
Gerhard Jäger*
Affiliation:
University of Bielefeld
*
University of Bielefeld, Department of Linguistics and Literature, PF 10 01 31, D-33501, Bielefeld Germany, [Gerhard.Jaeger@uni-bielefeld.de]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article deals with the typology of the case marking of semantic core roles. The competing economy considerations of hearer (disambiguation) and speaker (minimal effort) are formalized in terms of EVOLUTIONARY GAME THEORY. It is shown that the case-marking patterns that are attested in the languages of the world are those that are evolutionarily stable for different relative weightings of speaker economy and hearer economy, given the statistical patterns of language use that were extracted from corpora of naturally occurring conversations.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 83 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 74 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by the Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Aissen, Judith. 1999. Markedness and subject choice in optimality theory. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 17. 673–711.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aissen, Judith. 2003. Differential object marking: Iconicity vs. economy. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 21. 435–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blake, Barry J. 2001. Case. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bock, J. Kathryn. 1986. Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology 18. 355–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bock, J. Kathryn, and Loebell, Helga. 1990. Framing sentences. Cognition 35. 1–39.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bock, J. Kathryn, Loebell, Helga; and Morey, Randal. 1992. From conceptual roles to structural relations: Bridging the syntactic cleft. Psychological Review 99. 150–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bossong, Georg. 1985. Differentielle Objektmarkierung in den neuiranischen Sprachen. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Branigan, Holly P., Pickering, Martin J., Stewart, Andrew J.; and McLean, Janet F. 2000. Syntactic priming in spoken production: Linguistic and temporal interference. Memory & Cognition 28. 1297–302.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Breen, Gavan. 1976. Ergative, locative and instrumental inflections in Wangkumara. Grammatical categories in Australian languages, ed. by Dixon, R. M. W., 336–39. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan, and Thompson, Sandra. 2000. Three frequency effects in syntax. Berkeley Linguistics Society 23. 65–85.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard. 1979. Definite and animate direct objects: A natural class. Linguistica Silesiana 3. 13–21.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard. 1981. Language universals and linguistic typology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Croft, William. 2000. Explaining language change. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Dahl, Östen. 2000. Egophoricity in discourse and syntax. Functions of language 131–11.Google Scholar
Dixon, R. M. W. 1972. The Dyirbal language of North Queensland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dixon, R. M. W. 1994. Ergativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, John. 1987. The discourse base of ergativity. Language 63. 805–55.Google Scholar
Fisher, Ronald Aylmer. 1930. The genetical theory of natural selection. Oxford: Clarendon.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Givon, Talmy. 1976. Topic, pronoun, and grammatical agreement. Subject and topic, ed. by Li, Charles N., 149–88. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Joseph. 1963. Some universals of grammar with special reference to the order of meaningful elements. Universals of language, ed. by Greenberg, Joseph, 73–113. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. 1999. Optimality and diachronic adaptation. Zeitschrift für Sprach-wissenschaft 18. 180–205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hofbauer, Josef, and Sigmund, Karl. 1998. Evolutionary games and population dynamics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jäger, Gerhard, and Rosenbach, Anette. 2005. Priming as a driving force in grammaticalization: On the track of unidirectionality. Paper presented at New Reflections on Grammaticalization 3, Santiago de Compostela.Google Scholar
Jäger, Gerhard, and Rooij, Robert van. 2005. Language stucture: Psychological and social constraints. Bielefeld: University of Bielefeld, and Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, ms.Google Scholar
Joseph, Brian D., Arrieta, Kutz; and Smirniotopoulos, Jane. 1989. How ergative is Basque? Proceedings of the third Eastern States Conference on Linguistics [ESCOL '86], 25–36. Columbus: The Ohio State University, Department of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Kandori, Michihiro, Mailath, George; and Rob, Rafael. 1993. Learning, mutation, and long-run equilibria in games. Econometrica 61. 29–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirby, Simon. 1999. Function, selection, and innateness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroch, Anthony. 2000. Syntactic change. The handbook of contemporary syntactic theory, ed. by Baltin, Mark and Collins, Chris, 699–729. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Kumakhov, Mukhadin, Vamling, Karina; and Kumakhova, Zara. 1996. Ergative case in the Circassian languages. Working Papers 45, 93–111. Lund: Lund University, Department of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Lewis, David. 1969. Convention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Löfström, Jonas. 1988. Repliker utan gränser: Till studiet av syntaktisk struktur i samtal. Gothenburg: Institutionen för nordiska språk, Göteborgs universitet.Google Scholar
Maynard Smith, John. 1982. Evolution and the theory of games. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Næss, Åshild. 2004. What markedness marks: The markedness problem with direct objects. Lingua 114. 1186–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nettle, Daniel. 1999. Linguistic diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nilsenová, Marie. 2002. The pragmatics of differential object marking. Proceedings of the seventh ESSLLI Student Session, ed. by Nissim, Malvina, 221–31. Trento: Folli. Online: http://folli.loria.fr/content/stus/stus-2002.pdf.Google Scholar
Nowak, Martin A., Komarova, Natalia L.; and Niyogi, Partha. 2002. Computational and evolutionary aspects of language. Nature 417. 611–17.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Osborne, Martin J. 2003. An introduction to game theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Parikh, Prashant. 2001. The use of language. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Pickering, Martin J., and Branigan, Holly P. 1999. Syntactic priming in language production. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3. 136–41.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Plank, Frans. 2001. Das grammatische Raritätenkabinett. Konstanz: University of Konstanz, ms. Online: www.ling.uni-konstanz.de/~pages/~proj/~Sprachbau/~rara.html.Google Scholar
Reed, Irene, Miyaoka, O., Jacobsen, S., Afcan, P.; and Krauss, M. 1977. Yup'ik Eskimo grammar. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Language Center.Google Scholar
Selten, Reinhard. 1980. A note on evolutionarily stable strategies in asymmetric animal conflicts. Journal of Theoretical Biology 84. 93–101.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shields, Lynn W., and Balota, David A. 1991. Repetition and associative context effects in speech production. Language and Speech 34. 47–55.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Hierarchy of features and ergativity. Grammatical categories in Australian languages, ed. by Dixon, R. M. W., 112–71. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.Google Scholar
van Rooij, Robert. 2004. Signalling games select Horn strategies. Linguistics and Philosophy 27. 493–527.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vega-Redondo, Fernando. 1996. Evolution, games, and economic behaviour. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
von Neumann, John, and Morgenstern, Oskar. 1944. Theory of games and economic behavior. Princeton: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Young, H. Peyton. 1993. The evolution of conventions. Econometrica 61. 57–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, H. Peyton. 1998. Individual strategy and social structure: An evolutionary theory of institutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zeevat, Henk, and Jäger, Gerhard. 2002. A reinterpretation of syntactic alignment. Proceedings of the fourth International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation, ed. by Jongh, Dick de, Nilsenová, Marie, and Zeevat, Henk. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Zipf, G. K. 1949. Human behavior and the principle of least effort. Cambridge: Addison Wesley.Google Scholar
Zwitserlood, Pienie. 1996. Form priming. Language and Cognitive Processes 11. 589–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar